Category: Excerpts

The Strikers of Coachella: Read the Intro

The following is an excerpt of The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement by Christian O. Paiz, available wherever books are sold. In a Small Place In the summer of 1969, the United Farm Workers (UFW) newspaper, El Malcriado, published an eight-photo spread titled “The Strikers of Coachella”: two of Mexican women, two of Filipino men, and… Continue Reading The Strikers of Coachella: Read the Intro

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: An Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, available everywhere books are sold. THE MESSIANIC MOMENT, 1919–1931 The year 1919 marked the tercentennial of chattel slavery’s genesis in English North America. White supremacy may have warped notions of forgiveness, of forbearance, and of the significance of African bondage,… Continue Reading Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: An Excerpt

Native Americans and Enslaved Africans

The following is an excerpt from The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South by Charles Reagan Wilson, available everywhere books and ebooks are sold. Native Americans and Enslaved Africans Southern colonists, including Jefferson’s forebears, had been on the periphery of Western civilization at the beginning of settlement, but they self-consciously came as predominantly… Continue Reading Native Americans and Enslaved Africans

Agriculture’s Energy: Introduction

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution by Thomas D. Rogers, available now wherever books are sold. From 1900 to 2000, in the midst of dramatic population growth, Brazil experienced a neat demographic inversion. At the same time that it grew by a factor of ten, from 17… Continue Reading Agriculture’s Energy: Introduction

A Camp Meeting at the Gallows

The following is an excerpt from The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South by Michael Ayers Trotti, available now wherever books are sold. A Camp Meeting at the Gallows There is a fountain fill’d with blood,Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,Lose all their guilty stains,Lose all their guilty stains.The dying thief rejoiced… Continue Reading A Camp Meeting at the Gallows

Making Our Future: An Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard, available everywhere books are sold. I have spent much of the past six years traveling in and across West Virginia, crisscrossing mountains, hollers, creeks, and rivers along dirt roads and highways on fieldwork trips to interview quilters, fiddlers, striking… Continue Reading Making Our Future: An Excerpt

Global Christianity and the Cold War

The following is an excerpt from Global Faith, Worldly Power: Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire edited by John Corrigan, Melani McAlister, Axel R. Schäfer. Global Christianity and the Cold War The military and economic footprint of the U.S. abroad expanded rapidly after World War II. The growth of evangelical mission and humanitarian aid activities needs to be viewed in this context. The… Continue Reading Global Christianity and the Cold War

Refugees or Asylum-Seekers

The following is an excerpt from Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants & the Seeds of Resistance by Kristina Shull, available now everywhere books are sold. Refugees or Asylum-Seekers The massive scope and devastations of the Vietnam War indelibly scarred US political and social life, reshaping subsequent US refugee politics. Growing public divisions over the war also help to explain the seeming paradox… Continue Reading Refugees or Asylum-Seekers

Lula’s Rise From Metalworker to President of Brazil

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commonly known as “Lula,” has won the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections by 48.4%, much tighter than many had expected. As we await the second round of election please enjoy this excerpt of Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil by John D. French, which was the winner of… Continue Reading Lula’s Rise From Metalworker to President of Brazil

Opposition and Misperceptions of Black Reparations

The following is an excerpt from the new preface of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, Second Edition by William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, available now from your favorite bookstore. Opposition to Black Reparations Two major strands of raw opposition to reparations arise out of misperceptions. One category of misperceptions involves the… Continue Reading Opposition and Misperceptions of Black Reparations

The Peculiar Passion Surrounding Team Sports

The following is an excerpt from Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America by Randall Balmer, available everywhere books and e-books are sold. To Everything a Season The Peculiar Passion Surrounding Team Sports Competitive team sports developed in North America at a time of rapid social, economic, political, demographic—and religious—change. From the emergence of baseball in the 1840s to… Continue Reading The Peculiar Passion Surrounding Team Sports

Remembering the Arab Scare: America’s Response to the Munich Olympic Attacks 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago, on September 5, 1972, Palestinian nationalist militants from the Black September organization stunned the world with an attack on Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. Satellite television turned the hostage-taking siege into an international live-action news drama, which reached a bloody climax in the deaths of a police officer, five militants, and all… Continue Reading Remembering the Arab Scare: America’s Response to the Munich Olympic Attacks 50 Years Later

Child-Saving During World War II

The following is an excerpt from Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States by Anita Casavantes Bradford, available everywhere books and e-books are sold. Collateral Humanitarianism Child-Saving during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, concerned Americans continued to improvise child evacuation programs to safeguard endangered children across the Atlantic. The nonsectarian coalition brought… Continue Reading Child-Saving During World War II

How Starving Soldiers Survived

The following is an excerpt from Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 by Ricardo A. Herrera available everywhere books and e-books are sold. Faced with the collapse of the commissariat and the all too real potential of scattering the army across eastern Pennsylvania so that it might feed itself, Washington was on the horns of a dilemma.… Continue Reading How Starving Soldiers Survived

The Emergence of Russian America on Alaska’s Coast

The following is an excerpt from Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 by Andrea Geiger. Russian America In 1783, four decades after Vitus Bering’s first foray along the Aleutian Islands in 1741, Russia established what would become the center of its commercial operations in “Aliaska” on what Russians called Kodiak Island midway along the southern… Continue Reading The Emergence of Russian America on Alaska’s Coast

Looking Back: A Year After Taliban Regains Control in Afghanistan

In August of 2021, twenty years after the US-led-invasion ousted them from power, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan. In Us Versus Them: The United States, Radical Islam, and the Rise of the Green Threat, Second Edition acclaimed historian of U.S.–Middle East foreign relations, Douglas Little, examines how American presidents, policy makers, and diplomats dealt with the rise of Islamic… Continue Reading Looking Back: A Year After Taliban Regains Control in Afghanistan

The Gendered Anatomy of “Negro Crime”

The following is an excerpt from Talitha L. LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps… Continue Reading The Gendered Anatomy of “Negro Crime”

Built on Women’s Bodies

The following is an excerpt from Anne Gray Fischer’s The Streets Belong To Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification. Police power was built on women’s bodies. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in… Continue Reading Built on Women’s Bodies

A Photobiography of A Time and Place

The following is an excerpt from O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South, written by professor Berkley Hudson. Photographer O. N. Pruitt (1891–1967) was for some forty years the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Columbus–known to locals as “Possum Town.” His body of work recalls many FSA photographers, but… Continue Reading A Photobiography of A Time and Place

Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development

The following is an excerpt from Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European… Continue Reading Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development